The Truthfulness of Hollywood True Stories, Visualised

We’ve all stumbled out of the cinema from a true-story movie with a strange sense of disbelief: could that really be what happened in real life? Well, this series of visualisations charts the accuracy of Hollywood true stories, so you can find out once and for all.

The folks at Information Is Beautiful have started analysing films scene-by-scene, comparing the on-screen action to what actually went down in real life. So far, they’ve taken a close look at The Big Short, The Imitation Game, Dallas Buyers Club, The Wolf of Wall Street, Philomena, Rush, The Social Network and The Kings Speech. (They’ve even made their analysis available, if you want to check it over.)

You can choose the level of truth you demand in the movie to tweak the visualisation: If you’re absolute pedant you’ll get a rather different view than if you’re open to a little artistic licence. Then, for each movie, you can look at the action scene-by-scene to see how the story you were told compares to the truth.

However you slice it, of the films they’ve looked at, The Imitation Game is largely fictitious, while the The Big Short is pretty damn faithful. Go take a look.